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TL;DR: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB performance in OctaneRender
The RTX 3080 Ti offers nearly identical performance to the RTX 3090 for a lower price, as long as VRAM is not an issue. With half the VRAM of the RTX 3090, this new card may not be for everyone, especially those with large and complex scenes. In those instances, the RTX 3090's massive 24GB VRAM is still unmatched. However, for those that only need the 12GB offered by the new RTX 3080 Ti, this new card offers top of the line performance at a lower price.
Introduction
NVIDIA has a tradition of releasing “Ti” variants of their video cards which serve as a more powerful variant of the base model and often fill gaps between product tiers. The launch of the RTX 3080 Ti continues this trend. Compared to the base RTX 3080, the new RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM (12GB versus 10GB) and 18% more CUDA cores, although the maximum boost clock is a bit lower. In fact, in terms of performance, the RTX 3080 Ti should be closer to the RTX 3090 than it is to the RTX 3080.
Professional applications such as OTOY’s OctaneRender scale very well with the number of available CUDA cores and extra VRAM is always useful. On paper, the RTX 3080 Ti is an interesting product for GPU rendering, so let’s see how it performs in the real world.
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If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:
| VRAM | Cores | Boost Clock | Power | MSRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 | 12GB | 3,584 | 1.78 GHz | 170W | $329 |
| RTX 3060 Ti | 8GB | 4,864 | 1.67 GHz | 200W | $399 |
| RTX 3070 | 8GB | 5,888 | 1.70 GHz | 220W | $499 |
| RTX 3070 Ti | 8GB | 6,144 | 1.77 GHz | 290W | $599 |
| RTX 3080 | 10GB | 8,704 | 1.71 GHz | 320W | $699 |
| RTX 3080 Ti | 12GB | 10,240 | 1.67 GHz | 350W | $1,199 |
| RTX 3090 | 24GB | 10,496 | 1.73 GHz | 350W | $1,499 |
As we noted earlier, the RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080, and has close to the same CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3080, or $300 less than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need high GPU performance, but not necessarily the large 24GB of VRAM that is found on the RTX 3090.
One concern we have is that this is a 350W card – just like the RTX 3090 – but uses a 2-slot cooler that is essentially the same as what is on the lower wattage RTX 3080. In our testing, this makes it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.
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Test Setup
Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:
| Test Platform | |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-U12AP |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X570 AORUS ULTRA |
| RAM | 4x Crucial DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total) |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB |
| Hard Drive | Samsung 980 Pro 2TB |
| Software | Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (19043) OctaneBench 2020.1.5 |
*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of June 8th, 2021
One small note. The RTX 3080 Ti requires Nvidia’s driver version 462.65. However, for some unknown reason, that driver does not support the RTX 3090. For that card, we used driver version 462.59. This shouldn’t make a significant difference in our numbers, but I did want to call it out.
To test each video card, we used OctaneBench 2020.1.5. These tests were run twice on each GPU, with the best result being included in the graphs below.
Benchmark Results
Here are charts showing the performance of the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (in green) compared to the other cards we tested:
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Performance Analysis
The raw performance of the RTX 3080 Ti is quite impressive and lines up about where you would expect given its specifications. It should be noted that this benchmark does not fill up the available VRAM, so larger more complex scenes that need more than the 12GBs available would see different numbers. However, if that is not your case, the RTX 3080 Ti offers nearly identical performance to the RTX 3090.
How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 48GB perform in Octane?
The RTX 3080 Ti offers nearly identical performance to the RTX 3090 for a lower price, as long as VRAM is not an issue. This makes for interesting options for Octane users. Those that only need 12GB of VRAM can get similar results to the existing RTX 3090 but at a lower cost. While those that need lots of VRAM have an option that is only a few hundred dollars more. In the previous generation, we saw similar performance and VRAM options with the RTX 2080 TI and RTX Titan, however, in that case, the Titan was more than double the cost of the 2080 Ti.
One concern we do have is that this card draws as much power as the 3090, but has a much smaller cooler. So far in our testing temperatures of a single card have been within the specs laid out by Nvidia. Currently there is no blower style card, so stacking 3 or 4 in a system isn’t an option.
As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for Octane. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by “Video Card“) for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.
Puget Systems offers a range of powerful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.
Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.